


There Is Such a Thing As Too Much Despair

by Cortisol (hydrocortisone)



Category: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Genre: Despair, Gen, Nihilism, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:00:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27665764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrocortisone/pseuds/Cortisol
Summary: The first time the Antispiral showed a vision of the Spiral Nemesis to a spiral warrior, it made a mistake.
Kudos: 1





	There Is Such a Thing As Too Much Despair

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically a deleted scene from _Spiral Virus_ , because it just didn't mesh with the flavor of the rest of the text.

It was still, technically, an early cycle, the first time it personally showed a spiral warrior a vision of the Spiral Nemesis—the crushing, unstoppable collapse of the universe from the mass added by unrestrained abuse of spiral power.

“Thank you,” the warrior said when it was over, calm despite the mascara streaming down her cheeks.

It paused, its smile half-fading from its face. Gratitude was not the reaction it expected as a response to being shown the Spiral Nemesis; the race that had become the Antispiral originally reacted to its discovery with desperate, almost primal denial.

“I always suspected that the universe was like this,” she said, her mouth twisting into a smile that did not touch her eyes. “That there was never any point to pushing forward no matter what happened. It was always going to end in disaster.”

“It is a credit to you that you accept this so readily,” it said, settling on a fragment of debris from the battle. “You know what needs to be done, then.”

She nodded, silent except for a sniffle that ended with a sharp hack and a visceral gulp.

This was uncomfortably easy.

It nodded back, trying to focus on its relief at not needing to push further. “We will let you go, then, and you can—”

“I don't have the power to manage it,” she said. “You have to be the ones to do it."

It tilted its head, puzzled. “You have more than enough power to dismantle your armies, to stop the use of spiral power on your homeworld.”

She laughed bitterly. “The power to stick a bandaid on a gunshot wound. Do you have no idea what you just showed me?” Her hands gripped the handles in the cockpit hard enough to hear the padding of her gloves straining. “ _Everything that lives has to die_.”

“There’s no need to go that far,” the Antispiral said, now visibly alarmed. “Spiral Nemesis—"

“—is inevitable as long as life exists,” she spat, spray landing on the face shield of her helmet. “What are you even thinking with this stupid game of yours? It'll be all right if you just prune regularly? If you leave the roots, it's always going to grow back. It's going to keep evolving, getting better with every defeat, changing tactics until it lands on one you can't handle, because that's what evolution _does_. Life adapts to fit whatever environment it finds itself in. It's going to adapt to _you_.” She was breathing heavily, on the verge of crying again, but held firm. “And when it manages that, it's over. You have to stop it at the source. You have to kill everything, and then yourself.”

The Antispiral stared at her, speechless. The words coming out of her mouth were coherent, her deductive reasoning was logically valid, but it was also _complete madness_.

“I can’t do that,” it said. “What’s the point of a universe with no one to observe it?”

“There’s no point to the universe,” she said, seeming to stare it directly in the eyes. “It doesn’t have any meaning. It never did.” Even from millions of miles away, it could see her pupils were shrunken, cold, lightless.

She jerked the handles in the cockpit wildly, one hand flying up to flip open button covers and input a code. Spiraling wire cables sprang from outputs at her machine’s wrists, flying to wrap around its own face, around the section containing her own cockpit.

It jerked forward, instinctively. “Wait—”

In one flash of movement, the cables pulled taut, hard, cutting through and slicing the machine’s head in half. Its lights blinked and went dark. Disconnected levers, shards of transparent shielding, and the shattered meters from instrument panels floated freely in the vacuum of space.

It was careful to save revelation of the Spiral Nemesis as a last resort, after that.


End file.
